THE CONSTITUTION AS COVENANT

By James Wilson

            Covenant as both concept and reality has its origins in the people of the Old Testament.  The earliest recorded covenant is between Noah and God the Father.  God promises to bless Noah and his descendants and to never again flood the earth; Noah promises to serve God all his days.  A later covenant is between Abram – later Abraham – and God the Father.  In it God promises to bless and prosper Abram and his descendants and the patriarch promises to serve God to the exclusion of all others.  He commits to circumcision as a sign of his belonging to Yahweh – God.  The covenant with Moses is more elaborate, spelling out ten standards of behavior that will indicate human faithfulness to God while He gives them the promised land, Eretz Israel, and blesses and prospers them in the land.  By the time of the Mosaic Covenant other nations and cultures were entering into such agreements, but the Hebrews were unique in claiming their covenants were with the One God and originated with Him.

            Covenants are agreements between two corporate parties, one of whom is clearly the senior and stronger partner.  They state rights and responsibilities for the protection and blessing of the weaker by the stronger and the service or obedience to be rendered by the weaker to the stronger.  Covenants differ from contracts in that they are open ended – more like a cornucopia than a closed container.  Within the parameters of the Covenant – the Ten Commandments in the case of the Biblical Old Covenant – both parties are free to expand.  God can do more than He promised and the people can offer more profound service, but neither is free to give less than originally promised.

             The first American covenant – as opposed to a charter or contract of incorporation – is the Mayflower Compact of 1620.  The Pilgrims pledge to give all glory to God and advance the Christian Faith as they establish a human government for making such laws as would facilitate their divinely ordained purposes and the general good of the people.  In other words, the people themselves are the senior and stronger party; they create and commit to blessing government in order that it might serve them.  Other American civil covenants – such as the Constitution – follow this pattern.

            The point here is that most people think government the senior and stronger party because it has the backing of armed forces and agencies.  But the genius behind our Constitution and the laws created to implement it is that the people are sovereign.  We created and bless a government – but only so long as it serves us as the stronger and senior partner to whom it owes allegiance and submission.  That is why we specify which powers government may wield and state that any powers not specifically granted are not its property.  That is why we have a Bill of Rights for the protection of the people and nothing for the protection of government.

            Truth is we have never lived up to our end of the covenant with God; I refer here to Old and New Covenants that – in Christ – apply to all peoples everywhere.  The beauty of the founding of America is that our first leaders understood and proclaimed this reality.  Some periods have been better than others, the Great Awakenings coming immediately to mind.  But the sovereignty we hold over government was a gift of the sovereign God to Whom we owe all we have.  Instead of serving Him we have all too often exercised the sovereignty we were given to enslave some and slaughter others.  We have ceded power to government it was never meant to have.  We did all these things because of what we thought emergencies – as though God failed to foresee the westward expansion, the Great Depression, or even the War on Terror, and we had to step in and do what He could not.  This is idolatry – worshipping ourselves and our intellect in the place of God.  And the fruit is in the bin.

            Today we have massive unemployment, fifty million Americans on food stamps in the richest country in history, a government spying on us and threatening our right of religious liberty, free expression of ideas, and the responsibility of parents to seek appropriate medical aid and education for their children without government interference.  Even our children’s diets are under supervision.                      

            There is a way to address this impasse in a potent way, but it will require a lot more than some massive get-out-the-vote drive and educating the population regarding our origins and destiny.  The next posting of this blog will begin that address.